Cult of the Hexad (Afterlife saga Book 6) Read online

  I shuddered just thinking about him. And what last night’s dream had brought me. I had felt myself getting so close to it. As if I had been reaching out trying to chase the unknown. That feeling a woman has when being with a man like that. It had been so hot and carnal. So forbidden and if any of my church members knew what thoughts really went on in my head, then oh my, wouldn’t I be known as the wild child. Shunned wasn’t a strong enough word to cut it.

  Banished more like.

  Because they didn’t know what or who I dreamed of. They didn’t see what I saw. They didn’t see another version of my naked body being taken on an altar in wild abandon. They didn’t see me giving myself to not just a man…

  But a Demon with wings.

  “Hey Sinner girl, you been chastised again?” Ariana’s voice shook me from my dangerous thoughts. I looked round after realising I must have been staring at Hell for a good twenty minutes now. It was a replica of the painting ‘The great day of his Wrath’ by an English artist by the name of John Martin. It was something I found myself spending far too much time staring into thinking about the world I lived in. It was a depressing image and one that was put there for that very reason, I was sure.

  It showed the end of the world and a great eruption where both mankind and mountains fell together into the pit of ultimate despair. It often made me shudder to look at but I had to admit that in times of my own despair I found something unexpected in the sight of such destruction. For there at the bottom, amongst the other doomed souls and as the world crumbled into fiery depths below, one figure sat there and simply cried as she waited for her death.

  So I would look at that lone figure whenever I felt lost in a life I didn’t feel as though I belonged in and thought…well at least it could be worse.

  “You’re not looking at that God awful painting again are you?” My twin sister asked as she came to sit on my side of the bed and we both faced the wall that held the one reason for our sins, sins that we seemed to commit without even knowing it. Even though we were twins we were as far away from each other as fire and ice, in both looks and personality.

  We both had long blonde hair that we were forced to wear tied back into tight and often painful buns at the base of our necks. We were both pale and we were both short being only five foot three but that’s where the similarities ended. Ariana had a pair of cute dimples either side of her lips and when she smiled I often felt that as long as they were showing then everything would be okay.

  Her eyes would shine like blazing topazes and gave away her mood no matter how she tried to hide it. They were definitely the windows to her soul and that soul was nothing short of beautiful. Her lips made the perfect cupids bow and she had often been reprimanded for wearing lipstick as they always seemed to have a natural red tint that never went away.

  We were both curvy creatures and thankfully looked nothing like our mother who was painfully thin and looked far older than she was. But whereas I was heavier on top, Ariana was heavier in the bottom, with curvy hips that she couldn’t help but sway as she walked. I would often have little daydreams about what it would be like when we were freed of this place and could do the simple things we knew the outside world took for granted. Things like shopping for new outfits before going out for an evening and letting our hair down in more ways than one, I thought as I felt the digging pins in my neck holding all my hair into place.

  I had gotten dressed shortly after my mother had closed the door on me and the itchy woollen shirt under the hideous sandy coloured burlap dress they made all the woman wear was already making me sweat. I swear it was only forced upon us as another form of torture for us to endure. The summer months had been Hell.

  “Do you ever wonder what it’s really like down there?” I asked making my sister scoff at the question and scratching at my dress being reminded of what we were both still looking at.

  “God, its worse than I thought…you have stable duty again don’t you?” I laughed once and then shook my head.

  “They’re going to make me talk to someone this time.” I said looking down at my lap and ignoring the pang of hunger I usually got when being locked in my room.

  “You had another dream?” I nodded and closed my eyes against his image as if seeing him in my mind as often as I did actually caused me pain. I didn’t understand this addictive behaviour and why I couldn’t find the strength to let it go…to let him go.

  “Ah…I see.”

  “What am I going to do Ari, this is getting out of control?” I said covering my face with my hands and feeling ashamed, the way we were brainwashed to think. I felt my sister’s hand at my back and it took little force to lean into her embrace for the much needed comfort I craved right then.

  “We will figure this out Kay and if we don’t, then at least we will be out of this shithole soon.” I snapped my head up and shot a panicked look to the door.

  “Ssshh, you don’t want them to catch you saying that.” I warned knowing what our punishments were like. She just shrugged her shoulders and said,

  “Don’t worry Kay Bear, there’s no one home…some important meeting at Elders Mount or something, so we are safe.” I had to smile at her nickname for me that had stuck ever since my love of Carebears when I was a kid. And for some odd reason whenever I thought back to my childhood toys the image of a green haired girl came to mind. I had to wonder if it wasn’t some distant memory my mind was searching for. Maybe some eccentric neighbour or someone from the school we used to go to. Either way I doubted it was someone my mother would have known, not with green hair and a body full of colourful tattoos.

  “Yeah for now but what about Rory?” I asked leaving the image of that girl and getting back to our spiteful cousin knowing the last thing we needed was a repeat of what happened only a week ago…the bruises had only just started to fade.

  “Yeah well if that bitch wasn’t pregnant then she wouldn’t have dared, Uncle or not!” I shuddered at the thought of his wrath but decided not to remind her of our joint punishments during her rant.

  I wished I could have been more like her. Ari didn’t seem to be afraid of anything and I felt bad a lot of the time that she spent so much of her energy looking after me. Well okay, so it wasn’t like we were kids anymore but sometimes I think she forgot that.

  It was as if since that fateful day that drunk driver crashed into us she took on the role my father no longer had the chance to fill. He had died instantly and I would have been next if it hadn’t been for my sister, who dragged both me and my mother out of the car. She had saved us both that day but we both knew the mother we shared had also died in that accident. It was the most sinful of thoughts but we both wished it had happened that way so that we could simply mourn the woman we once loved as our mother. Instead the brutal reality was that the love we once had was lost long ago along with the fading memory of our father and hate had quickly replaced it.

  It was a sad truth our new lives had been forced to learn the very first day we were brought to the Hexad Colony. If I thought my sister and I had been close before the accident then what happened after was to forever cement that love and devotion for the rest of our lives. If it hadn’t been for Ari then I really don’t think I would have survived being forced to live here and no doubt Ari felt the same. To the Elders our ‘wilful ways’ as they called it, had to be beaten out of us for good and they had been trying to do just that for the last seventeen years.

  “Hey, come on Kay, it won’t be long now.” Ari reminded me that we only had a month until we finally got our time to leave like the others had. It was shortly to be our joint birthday in just over a months’ time and everyone who reached their twenty fifth birthday got the option to leave the Hexad Colony. I don’t think Ari and myself even spoke once about which choice we would make, no it was more of a case of counting down the days.

  The day we lost our father was the day we entered our own personal Hell. I looked up at the only painting I was allowed on my walls because its sole purpos
e was to show me what would happen to my soul if I disobeyed the Elders’ teachings. My sister had a similar painting in her room by the same artist and its title was just as depressing as mine being ‘The Destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah’.

  “I don’t think he was a happy man, do you?” Ari asked nodding at the painting and I had to laugh as she referred to the artist.

  “Maybe he lived here for a spell.” I said this time making her laugh.

  “It’s a possibility.” She replied nudging me and that was it. That was all it took to drag me from my distracted mind and back to the reality we needed to focus on.

  “I don’t see why you get to dream of the kind one.” I muttered pretending to be sulky. When Ari didn’t fire back with a witty reply I turned to look at her and was surprised to find her blushing. For the last eight months we had both been plagued with dreams of another life and let’s just say that the man in Ari’s dreams was a lot less frightening than the one in mine… or so the way Ari told it. But that wasn’t the only difference between our dreams. Ari experienced her dreams as herself, which I can imagine added to the deep blush that had crept its way across her usually milky cheeks.

  The man she dreamt of she only ever described as kind and loving towards her which was why we called him ‘The Angel’. But as for me, well that was a different matter entirely. My dreams were always as some useless bystander who was left to watch helplessly as another version of myself remained captive in some dark and handsome man’s bedroom. I had often woke silently screaming and panting to catch my breath as the sight of her destitute cries got too much for me to bear.

  I didn’t know why this was happening to us but for me at least it always felt like my other self was trying to tell me something. Maybe she was trying to let me know how I could save her from the dark man. It was strange the pull he had over her and the pull he had over me for that matter. It was as if whenever he was out of the room she would try everything to try and reach me. She would cry, she would scream, one time she even threw a chair to get my attention but there was never any sound in my dreams.

  Then he would enter and it was as if she did everything in her power to try and hide the fact I was watching. He never saw me and given the power it was obvious he had in abundance I was more than glad of it…or was I? Oh, who was I kidding, I had often wondered what it would feel like to have him look at me at least once the way he looked at her.

  I had once dreamt that after only minutes of entering the room he found my other self in nothing but a small towel after showering. One look was all it had taken before he ripped the towel away from her, bent her neck and bit into it as though his ravenous thirst for blood had been too much to wait. Her knees buckled and I let out a silent gasp just before he caught her then carried her to the bed all the time still with his fangs firmly embedded in her neck before he firmly embedded something else of his inside her.

  I wasn’t naive to what happened between a man and woman in love inside the bedroom. But having not experienced it myself did mean that when these certain dreams occurred I was left with a torrent of mixed emotions. Confused, flustered, embarrassed, torn but most of all, unbelievably aroused.

  I was ashamed to admit that seeing what I was forced to often left me feeling disgusted with myself. The fact that I managed to get turned on by watching him take her the way he did. But even more disturbing was how much my captive self seemed to not only enjoy it but crave it. It was all so confusing but most of all frightening to witness. There was no denying how much he scared me but my reactions to him added to that fear tenfold. He seemed to possess the power over the mind and that was one of the most frightening possibilities of all and one of the reasons we had named him…

  ‘The Demon’.

  “You had another dream as well…didn’t you?” I guessed when I saw her twisting the same dress I wore around in her hands. It was a nervous habit of hers and one that didn’t happen very often. Mainly when I asked questions like this one. My own nervous habit on the other hand was tucking my hair behind my ear or playing with the ends, one that definitely happened often seeing as I was far shyer than my twin.

  “Yes but I don’t want to talk about it this time.” She said, which was unlike her.

  “But…”

  “Do you want to tell me about yours?” Well she certainly had me there.

  “There you go.” I frowned at her smug face at guessing that I wouldn’t.

  “Don’t worry, we will sort this out.”

  “How?” I asked as I had long ago given up on these dreams ever fading into distant memories.

  “I have a plan.” She replied waggling her eyebrows at me and I groaned out loud. I was just about to ask what I knew would most definitely mean trouble, when we heard voices outside my window. We both signalled to each other at the same time, smiling as we usually did whenever we did something at the same time, like twins often did.

  “Trust me.” She whispered as she got off the bed and walked softly to the door. I gave her a nod knowing that there was only one person on this planet I trusted and it was her.

  “One month honey and then we will be free.” Ari reminded me and then held up the ring of keys giving them a little shake. I knew she had swiped them off the hook in the kitchen and I rolled my eyes at her humour, making her wink.

  She left me, quickly relocking my door and I held my breath as I usually did until I knew she had replaced them back in time. The clue in this was that I didn’t hear my mother’s high pitched shock of horror that her daughter could do something so insolent.

  I heard Ari’s feet on the staircase before I heard the front door open and I closed my eyes against the feeling of loathing I felt every time I heard my mother’s voice from behind a locked door.

  I knew it wasn’t right…that she wasn’t right. I remembered what my life was like before this horrible place and when you have lived a taste of the good, wholesome and normal, well let’s just say that it then shines a brighter light on all the wrong you’re forced to live with. All the wrong you’re forced to be a part of. I never feared Hell for all the reasons the elders taught us to fear it… no, I fear Hell for all the things they taught us to do and we were foolish to believe in. I fear the Hell I was living in right now and Ariana was right…

  One more month of Hell and we were free.

  Chapter 2

  Madness Seeped Through

  “I’m trying to help you…I want to help you.” I said tapping the glass I always saw her through, only now that glass was slightly cracked around the edges. Did this mean something? We had both tried to break the glass on various occasions, thinking it just as simple as then being able to walk through into each other’s world but it had never worked. So what had changed I didn’t know but looking at her now she seemed even more broken than before.

  It was another one of those times she simply sat on the bed and stared out into the night with tears streaming down her pale cheeks. She looked so sad I almost preferred it when she was angry just so that I too didn’t have the same reasons to cry as I did now. It looked as if someone had just taken her world away and I frowned knowing who. I swiped away my tears feeling angry at the same injustice that was forced upon us both.

  He had no right just to take her against her will and keep her locked in that room until he was ready for her body again. Could he not see what he was doing to her? I wished we had found some way of communicating but in all this time not one word had been spoken between us.

  Oh, we had tried in the beginning but nothing had worked. She had written things down on paper from the Demon’s desk but no words had shown. We had both tried to over pronounce our words so that we might lip read them but her mouth would blur and it didn’t take a genius to guess mine did the same.

  I had given up telling her that I would try and save her. Sometimes I spoke about the Colony and how long we had left until I could search for her. I had nothing to back up the ways I would accomplish this other than my blind faith and determinati
on. Not because this girl looked exactly like me, even in ways not even my own twin did but because I had been living her nightmare right alongside her for so long now, that I couldn’t actually remember a time before I dreamt of her.

  The stranger thing still was when I spoke to Ari about this she said the same thing about her Angel. She had no idea what he was called and like the man in my dreams, I too had no clue as to what his name was either. But there were some things I could be certain about and that was he definitely wasn’t human.

  Ari didn’t speak much about her dreams and for the first time in our life my twin and I were keeping secrets from each other. The funny part was that I knew we did this for the same reasons…the same sexual reasons. The only difference I guess was that the man in my dreams did things to the other version of me, whereas Ari’s Angel did his things to her personally.

  The sight of the door opening dragged my eyes back to the room and I felt my heart kick into a new beat at the first sight of him. It was the same as always. The very second I laid eyes on him I was gone. My mind would only focus on the most handsome monster I had ever seen. Carnal thoughts would flood my sensibility, rendering it as useless as if my hands were banging on the glass.

  He wore a dark suit this time and I actually swooned against the frame of my private window pane. I never took my eyes off him whenever he entered the room and I wasn’t the only one that he would overpower with his intimidating presence.

  My other self would watch him the same way I would, which was as though every time could be the last. Secretly the thought actually caused me pain and I never understood why. I was both terrified and infatuated with him. In fact if the other girl in his life didn’t look like my exact double then the agony of seeing him with another woman every night would have driven me even more insane than I most likely already was.

  I saw him speak and could tell instantly he wasn’t happy about something. His tensed square shoulders said as much even without seeing that formidable frown on his face. He removed his suit jacket and casually threw it over one of the chairs in the room like it no longer mattered. I spared a glance at the figure of me to see her swipe at her tears before turning to face him. She never cowered away from him and I had to admire her spirit. If that had been me I would lower my head and only move when he ordered me to.